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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

ryansouthgate.com

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Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#141

Post by hnlmorg »

mort96 wrote: post #117
lupusreal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.

I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best bu…

> It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.

there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.

This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#142

Post by redbell »

> With this post, I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse, and frankly, they were profiting off my work and my visitor’s data.

Ironically, if you look at the screenshot, just below the comments' section, you will read: 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data'. Seriously?! You are already torturing my visitors by throwing many ads, at the same time, on their faces. How can I trust you?

Also, what drives me cra*y the most about online Ads is that they are random and have no relation with the content of the page I am looking at. Oftentimes, they went extremely far by showing what I consider near explicit content.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#143

Post by hnlmorg »

secondcoming wrote: post #130
lupusreal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.

Websites get to control what ads are displayed. If a website integrates with Taboola they're explixitly opting in to these crap ads.

What's YouTube's excuse?

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#144

Post by bloak »

gruez wrote: post #126
tetris11 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough. what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same…

I would guess that a company like Apple (or Miele or whatever) pays some attention to the context in which their advertisements appear. I don't think they'd want an advertisement for iPhone to appear online with a weight loss pill on the left and a gambling site on the right.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#145

Post by secondcoming »

hnlmorg wrote: post #143
secondcoming wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websites get to control what ads are displayed. If a website integrates with Taboola they're explixitly opting in to these crap ads.

What's YouTube's excuse?

They allow them, and people who have ad personalisation disabled are probably seeing more of them

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#146

Post by yifanl »

chamomeal wrote: post #114
jrmg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, almost every YouTube ad is a scam. Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!). I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care. FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a b…

I used to get SO MANY “heres how I make $6,000/day in passive income with chatGPT”. I reported am all, I know it never did anything

I wonder if reporting them gives them more engagement, since that would mean you watched it and paid enough attention.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#147

Post by niutech »

jaapz wrote: post #27
Hard_Space wrote: post #3

Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be runni…

When it was released there were no ads at all, and it was a great way of quickly adding comments to your site. Of course there is no thing as free lunch so the enshittification was inevitable

There is a free lunch - see all those FOSS commenting systems.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#148

Post by jasoneckert »

When I was evaluating ways to add comments to my blog on GitHub Pages, I quickly passed by Disqus because it was a 3rd party service that I didn't trust for reasons like this.

Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#149

Post by dredmorbius »

panstromek wrote: post #134
codazoda wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use HN a fair amount. I often post articles here but I also feel bad about doing it because 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong. I think it might be good to cross post everything here and link to the HN comments for discussion. Is this frowned on at all? I always worry I'll get shadow banned or something for my 100 low vote posts. Here's the rule I worry about: > Please don't use HN primarily…

> 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong. This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted…

s/algorithm/dynamic/

HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se.

There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.

But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:

- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).

- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.

- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.

- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".

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